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Science, leading-edge technological advancement, computers, medicine etc.enTue, 20 Mar 2018 01:26:59 GMTvBulletin60http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/images/misc/rss.pnghttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/
Theranos founder charged with fraudhttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67036&goto=newpost
Wed, 14 Mar 2018 23:17:33 GMTThis was a long time coming.
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*Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes charged with $700m fraud*
The founder of a US start-up that promised to revolutionise blood testing has agreed to settle charges that she raised over $700m (£500m) fraudulently.
The Securities and Exchange...This was a long time coming.

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Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes charged with $700m fraud

The founder of a US start-up that promised to revolutionise blood testing has agreed to settle charges that she raised over $700m (£500m) fraudulently.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, a top US financial regulator, said Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos deceived investors about the firm's technology.

The agency also said the firm had falsely claimed its products had been used by the US army in Afghanistan.

Ms Holmes will lose control of the firm and be fined $500,000.

An SEC official called the fallout an "important lesson for Silicon Valley".

"Innovators who seek to revolutionise and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today - not just what they hope it might do someday," said Jina Choi, director of the SEC's San Francisco regional office.

Theranos was founded in 2003 when Ms Holmes was only 19, and sought to develop an innovative blood testing device.

The firm said its Edison device could test for conditions such as cancer and cholesterol with only a few drops of blood from a finger-prick, rather than taking vials from a vein.

In 2015 Forbes magazine estimated Ms Holmes' wealth at $4.5bn

However, in the same year reports in the Wall Street Journal suggested the devices were flawed and inaccurate.

More here: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43406050
]]>Irondukehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67036Stephen Hawking dies at 76http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67032&goto=newpost
Wed, 14 Mar 2018 04:24:48 GMTRIP. A brilliant mind.
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*Stephen Hawking, renowned scientist, dies at 76*
Stephen Hawking, the brilliant British theoretical physicist who overcame a debilitating disease to publish wildly popular books probing the mysteries of the universe, has died, according to a family...RIP. A brilliant mind.

Quote:

Stephen Hawking, renowned scientist, dies at 76

Stephen Hawking, the brilliant British theoretical physicist who overcame a debilitating disease to publish wildly popular books probing the mysteries of the universe, has died, according to a family spokesman. He was 76.

Considered by many to be the world's greatest living scientist, Hawking was also a cosmologist, astronomer, mathematician and author of numerous books including the landmark "A Brief History of Time," which has sold more than 10 million copies.

With fellow physicist Roger Penrose, Hawking merged Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum theory to suggest that space and time would begin with the Big Bang and end in black holes. Hawking also discovered that black holes are not completely black but emit radiation and will likely eventually evaporate and disappear.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/healt...ead/index.html
]]>Irondukehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67032Future AI Arms Racehttp://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=67016&goto=newpost
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 12:40:12 GMTThis is a general theory floating around that in the coming years the exponential growth in various technologies will converge to create the fourth industrial revolution. This will lead to changes more dramatic and more rapid than most can imagine and greater than we have certainly ever witnessed....This is a general theory floating around that in the coming years the exponential growth in various technologies will converge to create the fourth industrial revolution. This will lead to changes more dramatic and more rapid than most can imagine and greater than we have certainly ever witnessed. You can study trends and history and make delineations, argue about starting points, but I happy to suggest that when historians look back, they wont label last year as the explosion, or any of the preceding years but I expect that year is very close.

The key technologies probably rest around artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Soon these technologies will allow a select few companies and countries ahead of the trend to handle vast data and solve problems that will effectively remove humans from the process. The advantages in the market and in military capabilities are surely vast. It's rational for all parties to assume that this is a zero sum game. And that the winner can wipe out the majority of the gains made by all other parties historically. This makes me think the USA has the most to lose and that the current advantages it has even in the relevant future fields could be lost by other parties piggybacking on US progress and then making the key breakthroughs first and then basically advancing at an exponential rate off into the distance.

The extension of the fourth revolution to being a zero sum game winner takes all is probably an exaggeration although I maintain its rational for all parties to operate on that assumption. If so can a strong case not be made for massive and overwhelming investment of defense budgets in this direction?

I think we can expect the fourth revolution to hurdle us towards the fifth, surely the country to get ahead will most likely get there first. I label the fifth as Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) (AI(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity), an AI system billions of times smarter than the sum of all humanity, potentially dangerous to humanity, and obviously revolutionary. Nobody obviously agrees on likely dates but a median predictions/outright guess by experts in the field is 2040-2060 depending on the survey https://medium.com/ai-revolution/whe...t-ae5a6f128503. If one nation gets full control of this over others, we should assume they would rule the world. Far more likely is the threat of instability and even war in the years preceding its development if nations were getting close, and one nation felt another was going to get there before it. Its likely there will need to be major international agreements and a global Manhattan project that allow co-operation and control and the democratization of this tech and make it safe before its developed.

Looking at the short term and the developing arms race, are countries like China and Russia (especially China) better positioned in the coming years because they are effectively dictatorships in some form that can direct and control investment and push in down specific corridors? The Chinese are building the worlds largest quantum research facility at the moment and hope to build a quantum computer by 2020 with millions times more power than all the computers in the world combined. They also have far more control in directing their "private" industry. Private industry also has potential to make these kinds of breakthroughs first and that potential grows ever year as less capital is required to make tech advances (software not hardware), companies like google move to trillion dollar companies and the private industry can easily compete for the worlds best minds and soon it will be about the worlds best self learning AI software to advance things further.
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